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Ieya, Toyah’s fourth single, was released in June 1980. The song has become one of the cornerstones of Toyah’s music career. Ieya began its extraordinary life as a soundcheck jam:

A lot of my band were Jewish, and we all found it particularly offensive that the NF would recruit at concerts – they’d go around the audience intimidating the youngest, the smallest, the scrawniest boys into joining the NF By the end of this concert in Bath, the NF were chanting ‘Sieg heil’ at the back. Charlie Francis, our bass-player, found this intolerable, and Joel kept taking his guitar off to go and beat them up, which we all had to stop him from doing. Instead we just shouted back ‘Nazi scum’ and got the audience to chant ‘Nazi scum’. For the fourth encore, all we could think of doing was something that had started as a jam in the sound-check that day, which was ‘IEYA’. It was a sequence of chords that grew, so every verse had more chords added to it, and it had a fantastically simple chorus, a chant, ‘IEYA’. ‘IEYA, I am solar, IEYA I’m the beast.’

Ieya was re-recorded and re-released as a single in 1982. The song is almost always played during a Toyah gig, often during the encore. Ieya was written by Willcox/Bogen/Bush. Browse the full history of the song at Wikipedia.

Safari Records’ late 70s/early 80s timeline of Toyah dates the band signing to the label as January 1979, though their “Our History” implies it may have been late 1978:

In 1978 a Melody Maker postage stamp picture of Toyah together with a small but glowing review of one of the very few gigs that her band had ever played led us to a leaky rehearsal space under Waterloo Bridge, where we saw the band and they signed with Safari who then were pleasantly surprised to learn of Toyah Willcox, actress, her performances in The Corn is Green (starring Katherine Hepburn), Jubilee, Quadrophenia and her current casting as Miranda in Derek Jarman’s forthcoming The Tempest.

On This Day in 1980 Toyah’s double a-side single Bird In Flight/Tribal Lookwas released. The single was produced by Matt Dangerfield (The Boys) and recorded in Dec 1979 with Joel Bogen, Charlie Francis, Steve Bray & Pete Bush. Click below for a celebration collage from Official Toyah.

Happy Birthday Joel: All the best to Joel Bogen who is 58 today. Toyah’s guitarist and songwriting partner from the very beginning of her music career and through all the Safari Records years and albums. He co-wrote songs like Neon Womb, Danced, Computer, Elusive Stranger, Our Movie, Race Through Space, Vision, Love Me, Ieya, Bird in Flight, Jungles of Jupiter, Castaways, The Packt, Dawn Chorus, Brave New World, Laughing With The Fools, Angel & Me, Be Proud Be Loud (Be Heard), Dreamscape, Martian Cowboy, Moonlight Dancing and many others.

Something you don’t see every day – The Toyah band 1981 reunited for first time in 34 years! Joel Bogen, Nigel Glockler, Adrian Lee, Phil Spalding. Not in the same room altogether since a promotional TV appearance for Thunder In The Mountains in Germany, September 1981. Brilliant! One of the best posts in our, almost, 16 years of news. (Thanks to Official Toyah)

• Happy Birthday Joel: All the best to Joel Bogen who is 55 today. Toyah’s guitarist from the beginning of her music career and through all the Safari Records years and albums. He co-wrote songs like Neon Womb, Danced, Computer, Elusive Stranger, Our Movie, Race Through Space, Vision, Love Me, Ieya, Bird in Flight, Jungles of Jupiter, Castaways, The Packt, Dawn Chorus, Brave New World, Laughing With The Fools, Angel & Me, Be Proud Be Loud (Be Heard), Dreamscape, Martian Cowboy, Moonlight Dancing and many others.

• The Older Woman: Series Two: The second series of the radio drama, which was originally broadcast on ‘BBC Radio 4′ in August 1994, has just started airing on ‘BBC Radio 4 Extra’. Although Toyah doesn’t appear in this series she is still credited as she sings the theme tune, which has been very slightly changed from Series One – Listen at BBC iPlayer…

• Clipper Round The World: The best of luck to Toyah’s sister, Nicola, who is taking part in a 10 month round the world yacht race, which she started yesterday. View a photo of Nicola, holding a couple of treasured items, at Instagram…

• Toyah & Suzy: A great photo of Toyah and Suzy Quatro having fun in Chichester on Saturday night at Vintage TV’s third birthday celebrations - View here…

A rare 1982 article from German music magazine Popcorn, featuring great photos of Toyah, Joel Bogen and Phil Spalding from ‘The Changeling’ Tour. Would any German visitors care to translate? Click below to view a larger version. (Thanks to Glyn Whelan for this great scan)

Crackerjastic photos of Toyah and Joel at BBC Television Theatre (now the Shepherds Bush Empire), in late 1983, to film Crackerjack. They performed ‘The Vow’ (view the clip at You Tube), and appeared in the end-of-show line up, on the show which aired on 9th December 1983 on BBC1. Please click on the photos to zoom. (Thanks to Kev Tucker for these rare photos)

Yes, this is a word in your ear… Just uploaded to You Tube. Excellent quality footage of Toyah performing ‘We Are’, on German music programme RockPop, in 1981. Amazing! (Why didn’t British music shows emblazon huge photos of Toyah as backdrops?)

There’s just over a week until Christmas Day! Here’s an early Christmas present from Dreamscape (courtesy of the brilliant Andi Westhorpe – This site would have been far less interesting over the years without Andi – Think a Christmas tree without any colourful baubles and you get the idea ;)). Two highly rare photos of Toyah from the same session as the photo that was used on the cover of Record Mirror in January 1979. These were either taken in late ’78 or January ’79, probably the former. Please click on each to zoom. (Thanks again, and a Merry Christmas, to Andi)

• A rare photo of the Toyah band, circa late 1979, has recently appeared on eBay. It looks like it was taken in a pub while the band were on tour. The listing says: “The shot is date stamped 29 Oct 1979 by the UK pop music newspaper that received it”. Great photo!

• Pause, Rewind, Obsess: Quadrophenia: …has a cult following but, despite some terrific scenes and some memorable characters (like the gnomish, lovesick, little pre-punk girl played by Toyah Willcox), it feels even more narratively half-baked than Pete Townshend’s musical scenarios tend to be.

• Critical Mass: Improvisation and carving: This article includes a photo of the cast of The Ebony Tower.

• Canterbury People: Canterbury girls chance to be in Marlowe Theatre’s Sleeping Beauty: Budding young actresses have the chance to star in the Marlowe Theatre’s pantomime. Sleeping Beauty will be at the Marlowe Theatre from November 30 to January 20 and star singers Gareth Gates and Toyah Willcox.